A Woman of the Inner Sea (16 page)

And with such help Uncle Frank did not need someone marked with scar tissue, dead except for the peeling of potatoes, the eating of steak, the performance of the two-flick pour.

So by some mysterious pressure, the news report of Uncle Frank drove her not to writing comforting letters, but to traveling—in a
sense—further away. Without more than the most wooden thought of Murray, she intended to seal things with Jelly. There were no favors involved. Murray would be the favored one. Jelly would be benefited very little.

For grief had seized up her womb. She did not have her monthly bleed as women her age were meant to. She did not go through the phases of desire. She considered herself to be in cronehood. Her appetite, so high in Fiji two months before, was vanished. Poor Jelly would explore dead surfaces.

That evening ten Aborigines, seven men and three women, arrived in the barren dusk on their way through to a Sunday rodeo at Nevertire. Their children waited outside in the back of utes or station wagons, or else played hopscotch under the wide overhang of the Railway’s enormous top verandah.

Then four men wearing cricket flannels turned up. Their Saturday afternoon triumph, startling end-of-season bowling figures or else quick half-centuries, had put some bark into their laughter. They were not regulars but began remaking brotherly connections with those who were, even with Jelly, who tolerantly accepted them. For they had been to school together: the cricketers and Jelly and Guthega. But this was not the cricketers’ normal milieu. Usually they drank with greater comfort at the Bowling Club or Returned Soldiers.

It was hectic. The people going to the rodeo bought out the Railway’s supply of peanuts to pacify their waiting children. The cricketers were on a binge and were generous with shouts.

Though the pattern by which Jelly brought Kate her pint had by now the solidity of something more aged than most civilizations, he knew somehow that within its scope she had changed by degrees.

He said this evening, Would you like to come back afterwards for a cup of tea?

His face had become white under the stress of asking. But she knew the mention of tea was more than a pretext. He often spoke affectionately of it. All the drinking he did here might have been imposed on him by his fame as dynamiter and tacit president of the bar. Drinking tea, he was a private man.

—I’ll have a lot of glasses to wash, said Kate. It will be late. But yes.

And it
was
late as the cultists of the Railway drank their way
into the treacly rind of their evening. The cricketers got drunk, looked at their watches, told everyone proudly what trouble they’d be in with their wives, but swore that from now on this would be their pub.

Jelly didn’t believe them and said casually, Telephone’s in the hall, boys. Why don’t you ask them to join us?

At last, they began to gather themselves, saying again that they’d be back soon. Loudly, they wondered why they had neglected this golden place for so many years. Their tongues were thick and they had that strange wooden look behind their eyes. But they were surer of the schoolyard bonds they would now renew and cement with Jelly.

Softly belching and uttering parental threats, the Aborigines had long gone, crowding their children into their vehicles.

—By Christ, Sharon, you get in the back of that bloody truck!

Guthega was taken home by his son Noel. The Cornerman and the Plaqueman had both left an hour past. Reassured and appalled at the one time, Jack watched Kate come to the front of the bar and say to Jelly, You’re ready? Jelly rose, sighing in a way which was meant to tell her not to expect Elysium.

Outside, in a northerly with red dust on its breath, he said, This isn’t going to be the most exciting night of your life, love.

He touched her wrist to ensure she knew that. He did not have his truck. He believed the Myambagh police paid particular notice to drivers whose vehicles lay parked outside pubs such as the Railway for hours at a stretch. It was a safe bet that their blood alcohol was at least modestly high, as Jelly’s surely was after his quarter-bottle of Bundy.

They walked down the railway line, the wind punching at their shoulders. Enormous brown-eyed Jelly, stupendous in the chest and even greater in the girth, yet with two little satchels of buttocks. Kate whose ambition to become pursy and obese and coarse had not yet quite been realized and who seems to Jelly to be the only beauty abroad at this hour. The town utterly silent, finished with its Saturday night. The oblivious town she loved beyond utterance: all the rich hours wantonly unharvested.

Across the railway lines, silvered by the moon and stretching abstractly away without any contingency of actual traffic, of diesel engine or freight trucks. A Jacob’s ladder laid flat on the earth between Murchison’s Railway Hotel and Jelly’s cottage. Nineteenth-century
pastoralists and Members of Parliament lobbied and argued and paid each other off to get the line to come here, across the Wrangle from the south, to get the spur line stretching to Cobar, the one which Jelly was famous for dynamiting. Tonight, though, the rails looked a mere decorative border between Myambagh’s two hemispheres.

Over the track, by the Returned Soldiers, the Cantonese husband and wife who ran the restaurant for the Returned Soldiers were leaving with plastic bags in their hands. Frugal people who had found a niche in Myambagh, nested down between the memory of wars in the RSL. Past Dunnegan’s Country Stores where Kate had recently bought the gumboots she needed for hosing the pub pavement down. Left by the Captain John Eglington High School, left again at the St. John Ambulance. Bardia Street, Myambagh.

Jelly’s weatherboard cottage hunched down on its foundations. It had a curved corrugated iron roof of a contour which had been thought fashionable around the time of World War I, and there was a sense of many successive families about it. Now, though, it belonged to wifeless Jelly. As he had promised, the gardening hadn’t been exactingly done. But at some stage, someone had planted things there, so that it looked luxuriant.

In his kitchen, by his electric stove, Jelly put on the kettle. He put a tube of tablets on the table beside the place where his teacup would go.

—Hypertension, he explained.

The kitchen was clean. Its floorboards were varnished. There was no smell of dust.

When the tea was made, he filled a cup according to her instructions and put it on her side of the table.

—Sit down.

He himself sat on his side of things and began to sip.

—Jesus. Who would have thought, Kate?

—I’m not going to marry you.

—Wouldn’t worry if you were.

—But I’m not.

In the country bedroom to which Jelly leads Kate, there is a splay-footed dresser with a circular mirror. Built to carry a woman’s cosmetics and mementoes, what it does carry now are
three
Best and Fairest Trophy Won By
 … The name space in each case is blank.

On the wall above the bed hangs a picture of the explorers Burke and Wills. Having crossed Australia from south to north and returned to find their Cooper’s Creek depot abandoned, they sit by moonlight beneath a tree on which is marked
DIG
. They have unearthed a modicum of supplies the abandoning parties left cached there for them. This is a core Australian picture. Thirst and dread above the double bed.

The bed itself is high as if Jelly has reinforced it against his weight, or uses two mattresses. There is an easy chair whose seat is filled with folded newspapers, the top one with a picture of the Prime Minister who greeted the earlier Kate in Macquarie Street.

Jelly indicates a bedside lamp. Nearly without breath, he says, Do you want this left on?

—Yes.

Between the dresser and the chair she found beneath the burden of his weight his little white gland and persuaded it forth. The cries of his gratitude took away her sense of a silent midnight. He had not expected anything like this to happen to him. That was why she was doing it.

Since it was not a marriage, she left him when he was still asleep, in the profound anesthesia of 3
A.M
., when even the Eglington Highway was silent and might not be able to be revived by dawn traffic. Then she went back to her cherished room at Murchison’s Railway Hotel.

In the real morning she woke and went downstairs and found Connie Murchison hosing the pavement under the verandah. She or Kate did that every morning, while Jack slept off the brotherly damage his clients had done to him. Connie kept her dark eye on the thread of water, as if she feared that, unsupervised, it would stop running.

—You know he’s not a well man, Jelly.

—I noticed he has to take pills.

—Okay. As long as you know.

If anyone knew it was silly to chat about the odds, it should have been Connie. Her own sister had been safe from hypertension, but had made up for that with her own hand. Kate could have told her: I had children, one of whom could do arabesques to
the point of her own and the audience’s exhaustion, the other a clinic-certified catcher of balls. And despite the eternity of jetés and sure fingers which seemed to be guaranteed it had meant nothing. So what did it mean?
He’s not a well man
.

She knew enough though to understand she must pretend it meant something. That it might have a weight for her.

—None of my business, Connie told her. But I’m surprised he’s capable of it, carrying all that weight.

Kate said nothing. Was she meant to explain how she had found his tiny, boy-thin sexual purpose, and cajoled it into surprising him?

Lying in Jelly’s arms Kate listened to how thoroughly the world had elected Jelly to the status of Dynamiter.

—It’s all true enough. I’ve got the stuff out there in the shed. Gelignite and detonators. In an Esky.

The Esky. As Australian as the dismal Burke and Wills who despaired every night over Jelly’s bed. Insulated beer and picnic carrier. An item eloquent of a good life and cool beer and charred steak devoured in the mottled shade of gum trees. You unlocked its lid and—so it seemed—out came the voices of children, the busy small talk of women, the jovial bark of men. Except Jelly’s Esky, which held a different sort of picnic.

—Took the stuff from the railway. Every bugger knows. Even the cops know. Pretty sure I’ll look after it. If it went off, watch them disclaim all knowledge! World’s full of bloody hand-wringers and hand-washers.

Whereas you could say of Kate and Jelly that they were a mating of utter destinies. No luxuries of evasion for them.

—Good condition, said Jelly, the lot of it. No sweating. I keep a dehumidifier plugged in out there, just so everything’s in prime condition. Everyone wants me to do it see. Except people like the Shire President. He’s got some pasturage west of the Cobar line. Higher bloody ground anyhow. And he doesn’t want to be incommoded. He wants his sheep bone dry and to hell if Myambagh’s awash.

How Jelly studied the water patterns on the ceiling during these quiet talks.

Kate wondered if this slander on McHugh was well founded.

—How does he get elected then?

Jelly shook his head. The electoral energy of men like that was a mystery to him.

—So … most ordinary people want me to blow the shit out of the Cobar line. They don’t expect anyone else except Muggins here to be bloody stupid enough to do it. At least, that’s their bloody story.

Under his burden, he began to gasp a little. It might have been laughter.

As she went out one morning at the Railway Hotel, along the verandah to find the women’s shower which she alone used, to wash off the sweat of six or seven tranquil and undemanding hours by Jelly’s side, she saw the town in all its indistinction, the red roofs of corrugated iron, in the nation which raised corrugated iron to an art form. The occasional flash brick and red tile—a bank manager’s, a doctor’s, a stock and station agent’s. People who didn’t drink—except as an aberration like the one which struck the cricketers—at the Railway Hotel. People who would never take hold of one of Kate’s perfect two-pour schooners. And all of Myambagh: the vernacular corrugated iron, the more particular red tile, capping seven hundred dull breakfasts, two thousand expressions of heroically unenlightened opinion; and she felt a pulse in her from all that oblivious and peaceful ignorance, a pulse something like love, and certainly like a brand of patriotism.

Under the spray of Myambagh water, from a shower rose installed perhaps forty years ago, under that hard spray of mud-tasting water from the river or of alkaline water from deep beneath, fossil water as old as the stone, she soaked her thickening thighs and saw a dimpling on the flesh, a minor model of her shoulder scars, and she was so pleased that in mute celebration she took to scrubbing her hair with the hard soap and the obdurate water.

Returning, content after her fashion, she had to pass the men’s showers, where the Monks and Escapees could be heard hooting, cursing, farting and objecting to farting, and invoking Christ when the first gush of water from the shower roses hit them. It was growing cold outdoors now in the mornings. Men often sprinted along this exposed verandah, half-naked or naked beneath overalls. They sneezed all the time, for in the steamy and populous men’s bathroom there was no chance of drying a body out properly.
She was delighted that she had leisure and space to pat herself dry. It was a vengeance against the cheapness of their minds.

Striding by the steamy men’s bathroom one cold blue dawn, she met the painter-plasterer who had once knocked on her door and asked her to a party in another pub. He had the same bruised look about the eyes as Connie.

—Selling yourself cheap, aren’t you, love?

She could tell he assessed her again then, and saw how she had grossened, and wondered why he’d bothered coming weeks before to her door, asking for her company. In her mind she was confident that given another three months, she would no longer resemble what he counted as a woman. She was on the way to being exempt from his attention. She was in training for being beneath notice.

So she embraced Jelly’s grossness because she desired it for herself. Nor could the man she met on the verandah, a reactive man, a man living by the pay packet, understand how Jelly was engorged with his dynamiting past and future. Jelly was like Uncle Frank, a lovable and inferior man claimed for diviner purposes.